McCool: We'll respond to whatever changes in the marketplace transpire around storage or virtualization or networking, either through our own internal development or continuing in a partner model. Right now we feel extremely well-positioned through the partnership and also a broader set of partners on how we can bring this to bear around the network architecture. We'll be very focused on the nature of storage traffic and how it moves across an IP-based network, and what that means to the cloud. Look at our core business and what has to converge to make that happen. Obviously, we've made the first moves by bringing together Fibre Channel over IP, which reduces the network complexity in operating over a storage environment. The fact that now you can run any compute system, either with network-attached storage or block-based storage, without having to worry about pre-provisioning what network type, has inherent flexibility. It's an important component as you start to move to more cloud-based architectures or data center-to-data center architectures.

You have to take the view of how we look at the entire problem. We'll always look at the challenge around the data center, or this compute-storage environment, from our core of switching and routing. That's the way we approached the opportunities we saw with VMware and EMC. Where can the core network provide value to those systems? If we looked at computing, we saw that there's been a lot of innovation at the chip level, a lot of innovation at the operating system level, and the real next step in those computing platforms was how they integrated with the network. That market transition around virtualization really let us take network technologies and drive them in.

We'll take the same approach with storage. Are there opportunities for us to build around the network to make it better for our customers to run their storage environments?

Today we feel that we understand where this is going from a storage perspective, but it's a pretty dynamic market with this transition around cloud and virtualization. If there's other opportunities where we can add value to the storage environment through the network, that's how we'll approach it.